There’s always something miniature about Off-Leash Area’s riveting movement-theater productions. Yes, they’re often produced in small spaces, including the garage of co-artistic directors Paul Herwig and Jennifer Ilse. But it’s also the way in which Herwig and Ilse compress, hone and embed the major events and existential issues of human life (birth and death, being and meaning, parenting and family, abuse and mental illness, war and peace) into singular characters as finely wrought as figures inhabiting whole worlds painted on a thimble.

These characters, also realized through the note-perfect conjoining of economical movement and spoken text, are also as accessible as they are profound. Herwig’s war-shocked soldier Ivan, in the Russian-inflected "Ivan the Drunk and His Terrible Tale of Woe," is no exception — as is, by extension, Ivan’s constant companion, "Burden." Burden, you see, is both character and metaphor: a set of clothes stuffed with (as is gradually revealed) talismans of Ivan’s past (clothes, tableware, gun, the ever-present bottle of vodka), as well as an imaginary being Ivan animates and engages through the intensity of his own needs, emotions and memories — as well as his continual attentions.

In other words, Herwig plays two characters. Without one, neither would exist. And Herwig’s performance is a tour de force as Burden functions as friend, accuser, listener and the literal baggage that Ivan unpacks as his life — and the violence that imbues it — unfolds within the 90-minute performance. Rounding out the cast are five superb women (Ilse, Karla Grotting, Judith Howard, Kym Longhi) who portray family members, lovers, villagers and soldiers with vivid stolidity.

Longhi also designed the costumes, some of which are fantastically surrealistic. Ilse created the choreography. Herwig designed the sets and props, which shift, fold and unfold to reveal a Russian Orthodox heaven in the end, presided over the magisterial Howard. Max Sparber’s text includes ribald and groaner jokes, which Ivan tells to Burden, and thus to the audience — making us complicit, as well, in a performance as imaginative as it is moving.

"Ivan the Drunk and His Terrible Tale of Woe," 8 p.m. Thursday-Sunday, through June 20. Open Eye Figure Theater, 506 East 24th Street, Minneapolis. Tickets $12-$18. 612-724-7372.